well I certainly wasn't expecting this 1 does stopping work on this game(temporarily) involve bugs? I presume it would be but I'm just curious since it seems to me that there a fairly straight forward thing to deal with

It's not really bugs, no, although that certainly is a factor. There are more than I'd like right now, and since we are still changing the codebase I can't really say how many there are until we stop adding them, heh. Having proper time to test is a big thing.

It's honestly a lot more about systems design and balance. With the various game systems, are they as fun as they can be? As clear? Are there some that need yet more rejiggering because of how annoying popups continuously appearing is? Should international abilities be direct-use, for instance? Or is that simply a case of them needing to somehow display in a way that doesn't spam your sidebar?

That's just one example. But for another, how about the economy stuff? I'm fairly well versed in that sort of thing from past experience with strategy games, and getting that balanced is not a quick job. The 10,000th player sometimes finds something really off with them that nobody else did. But right now lots of people are exploiting the economy.

There are a variety of solutions that I can think of, some of them very straightforward. However, they increase the fiddle-factor a lot. They encourage players to fiddle with the dials to optimize things. We went through that with various mechanics in AI War for quite some time. In many games, a lot of 4X games in fact, they introduce AI governors to handle that sort of fiddling for you.

To me... I don't know. I'm against that. I think if you're getting into AI governors, something else is maybe wrong. Not for sure, and maybe I'll eat my words and wind up coding something like that. But I don't like it. If there's an aspect of the game that should "play itself" in order for me to have fun, that just feels icky. So rather than going with the simpler solution and just doing what other 4X titles have more commonly done, I've been trying other things. With varied success. In other past games we have solved some of those problems in certain contexts. I want to have time here to truly solve that in this context so that people can be happy with the economy and not exploit it, but we don't have any sort of system where the game is playing for you.

2 could I help with the testing for this game as well? (if this is lateotu were talking about) I wouldn't be much help in turns of insight really since I don't really play that .type. of game but id be more than happy to bug hunt I've discovered testing stars that I really rather enjoy bug hunting.

3 are you sure its as straight forward as think its going to be? I vaguely remember we had a set deadline when I first started testing stars but we know how that turned out don't we.

I lack the arrogance at this point to say that I'm sure of that. If you asked me a year ago, I would have confidently told you yes. But at this point...?

In all honesty I do feel like it is what I think it is. I've done enough of this exact sort of game before that I know what it is, from top to bottom. I'm not inventing a new genre. There are also multiple other games on the market now that do a lot of what I want, but not fully everything, and so I can pull ideas from them and add the things I thought were missing. In many respects this is what AI War did.

SBR and TLF and some of our other titles were really challenging ones because they try to break really novel ground. And I absolutely love doing that. But sometimes it's also really fun to just take a specific idea and really try to run with it as well as you can and do some stuff that people don't even know they're missing. I feel like the AI War expansions all fit that sort of description if you compare them to vanilla AI War, and Tidalis was largely that way for that small portion of the market that noticed it at all. Bionic had aspects of that, although we made a key mistake of having two cooks and a design that got more ambitious partway through the project. It mostly worked out, and I'm proud of the game, but we had far less understanding of what we were going to make before starting that game than before starting this one.

Actually, that's an important thing to note: I have far, far more detailed of an idea of what this game is going to be like than I have any other project in the past. So there is that going for us.

4 just out of curiosity besides what you mentioned about being burnt out is there any particular reason you choose not to go with the idea of putting it into early access?

Well, "you only get one release on Steam."

Downsides as expressed by one of our staff: Loss of revenue because we never get a full "launch period" and from negative EA reviews (the current state of the game is extremely rough fun-wise), flood of people who don't realize (or don't care) they're playing pinata with the developer. Probably not being able to actually do the 1.0 release in November or even December anyway, for the same reason as without a EA period.

Or as another staff member put it: I'd say the landscape has changed dramatically since Valve launched the service. There have been enough false promises and abandoned projects in the space, that most are super wary about putting money toward an Early Access project -- unless it's something that really, really speaks to them. Another question to ask: Is SBR suited for Early Access? Many space/sci-fi games apparently are, but that might not be the case with SBR. Then again, it might be, but I feel like it's way more likely for a given game to find its audience at 1.0 over Early Access at this point. I'm not against Early Access entirely -- I think it could be an integral part of the process, but I do worry about the idea of making Early Access SBR's coming-out party.

I had my own lengthy thoughts about it as well, but I'm not sure where I put them. The other two expressed it really well, though, and it was basically my fears also.

1 sorry I clearly didn't word that correctly what I meant was while your working on that other game will this game be getting bug fixes in general just because its seems a really straight forward thing to be doing on the side again sorry I understood perfectly WHY you decided to stop temporarily working on it.

2 awesome!

3 I certainly hope you do having that game end up like this one would utterly ridiculous

4 fair enough I personally prefer what your doing to the ea thing this won't have the problems that those other 2 options will have

ps it'll be interesting to see what happens stars after you (hopefully) finish lateotu on time.

Provided the financials work for you, it definitely seems the right choice.

Whilst I've been very ill the last month, I kept lurking in the forums and could see progress was being made. However it read like you were completely under the pump both personally and professionally.

Also I opened up the game this morning for a quick glance at the changes and from what I could see there's been a definite improvement to the UI experience. I could also see some of the design warning signs of overthinking things (I have this trouble myself). Giving yourselves a break from SBR seems the best thing to do. The deluge of new titles coming out now and also time to reflect on what works game wise (and financially) makes it a sound choice.

Whilst I'm not in your position, I was starting to panic for you and Arcen.

I was hoping this was THE game for me this year, I can now look forward to a more awesome thing in the coming year.

When I recover some what more, should we continue to add items for SBR to Mantis?

Honestly, I feel like you've almost certainly made the best decision on multiple levels.

Having gotten to faff about with the game myself a little now, I definitely see the makings of a game I'll certainly have fun with, but at the same time, it's very clear that there's still much to be done - and with your previous due date being what it was, I had a bad feeling that you'd have to rush the ever-loving hell out of things if you wanted to stick to that date, and nothing good ever comes out of that sort of thing. And yeah, having heard some of your previous stories about unfortunately-ill-timed releases, I definitely wouldn't want to roll the dice during a period where you'd be up against MULTIPLE major releases, immediately followed by a number of sales that you could easily fall under the radar during.

And I certainly wouldn't want a game that despite its current flaws is still pretty darn fun to suffer that kind of fate, especially given the effects that a release right now would likely have on you and your company. If you guys were gone, who else would I trust to make such offbeat titles in the future? ;3

I for one (for what my doofy office worker opinion's worth, anyway) think you're making a good choice, and I think this'll give you time you need to not only get the relaxation you sound like you need at this point, but also to ensure that this is the best damn game it can possibly be. There currently aren't too many games in the genre that have held my interest that aren't the progenitor juggernaut that is Civilization itself - but I think you're one of the people I'd trust most to make a game I'd enjoy as much as I did 1, 4, and 5. Don't rush it and make a Civ 3. =333

I already responded to your email about this, just so you know, since Yahoo can be a real snotwad and sometimes doesnt like to actually SEND the blasted things yet will tell me that it did (sigh... why cant technology just WORK? I keep having to tell people directly if I send them something, because of this, which almost blows the point of email to begin with...), but I'll just reiterate that I definitely think this is a very good move. There's just.... so very many problems with releasing now or next month. And that's just from my point of view. It'd really suck to have it go the way Valley did when up against Diablo. I think that game SERIOUSLY deserved more attention than it got. I wish all these damn games next month werent releasing in one big stupid clump like that, really. All I"m really buying is Anno, myself, but that's another story.

Just out of pure curiosity, has this game been the longest development cycle you've done so far? Or was AI War's original version longer (because holy heck, that game is COMPLICATED)? I mean, this game really has a TON of stuff to it at this point and has been going for quite awhile. Should be pretty great once it's done though.

Definitely looking forward to.... whatever the heck the next game is going to be called though. I think that's the one I'm most excited about since BD, which is saying something. It just sounds like a great concept.

I think this makes a lot of sense and I wish you all the best. I was beginning to feel that even by the end of November, there was no way SBR was going to be able to be a game that fully lived up to its potential on release (which I think is huge, btw - I've been ranting at my friends about this game a bunch). Hopefully, this side project gives you the breather it sounds like you need (though I know it'll inevitably generate its own stress). I look forward to both games now.

Do you want us to continue posting things on Mantis for SBR or hold off for now?

2. The point about "if the game is great, it doesn't matter when you release" is somewhat taken, but I think that people do tend to overlook all the great "cult classics" that never caught on for one reason or another. In other words, this smacks a bit to me of being over-confident. Which I have certainly been many times, but am not really feeling in the spirit of right now.

System Shock says hi. That's a cult classic legend of a game that just never took off and never made the money back due to a botched release.

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Firstly, things turn out differently. And secondly, than you thought.Ahem. I approve of this. SBR needs some more thinking and planning done, and having a good deal of breathing room will probably be necessary.

Of course, as always I hope this doesn't cause any financial stress Arcen can't handle

There was indeed a feeling of panic going around. And I understand the concept of becoming too intimate with the project. I am in a similar situation, too many months - too much code.

SBR needs more work in its systems, interactions, gui, story, tooltips,combat, AI, pacing, etc, etc. A lot of work.

As others have said and I agree, a project should stay in EA at least for a year as a business model and build momentum. Barring that it would feel like a cash grab game with extreme risk for the buyer and it would face harsh criticism from youtubers and the community in general. Add to that the fact that you're not a new studio so people have expectations. You can't be productive in such an environment and you need a community manager that is a true Warlord.

So basically, you'll be working on the new SHMUP to get that rolled out ASAP. When do you expect the Alpha to start? I saw an earlier post where it was posited that this will be like the alpha/beta releases of TLF, where the game is available directly from Arcen (or via Humble Store) from its earliest playable state, and then you push updates out from Arcen directly. Any thoughts on what your asking price for the game will be?

1 sorry I clearly didn't word that correctly what I meant was while your working on that other game will this game be getting bug fixes in general just because its seems a really straight forward thing to be doing on the side again sorry I understood perfectly WHY you decided to stop temporarily working on it.

OH, I see -- sorry. No, there won't be any more patches for the beta of SBR until the interim game is completed, probably. I want to give the interim game our full attention so that we don't wind up right back in this situation with a game that isn't quite complete but where time is running out, etc.

It takes a lot of memory power to keep the design for games like this in my head, and I tend to forget a lot about older games as soon as I get too far into a new game. It's kind of shocking to me how much I forget, actually. In the case of some games, that can actually be useful because then I can come back with fresh eyes and solve problems that I couldn't solve before. My intent is that will be the case with SBR.

Anyway, so there are overall three reasons:1. It does eat up time, even if the increments are small (it's like eating a bag of mini-Oreos: even though they are small the bag is still a lot of calories).2. I need to "unload some stuff from RAM" to properly focus on the new game.3. I need some mental distance from SBR just to get back in a fully-positive frame of mind for working on it.

Whilst I've been very ill the last month, I kept lurking in the forums and could see progress was being made. However it read like you were completely under the pump both personally and professionally.

Yikes, I'm really sorry to hear that you've been so ill! That's definitely no good. And yeah, your assessment of my own situation is pretty spot on. It hasn't been great for the rest of the other staff either.

Also I opened up the game this morning for a quick glance at the changes and from what I could see there's been a definite improvement to the UI experience. I could also see some of the design warning signs of overthinking things (I have this trouble myself).

When I recover some what more, should we continue to add items for SBR to Mantis?

Heh. I mean, you can if you really want, but a lot of me wants to go "please don't!" I need mental space from it, so anything you log right now I'm going to respectfully set aside until work resumes on SBR. At that point absolutely I'll want feedback again, but right now I'm trying to get my head into the space for the interim game and just get my blood pressure down a bit from what it has been for the last while. I've been blacking out and developed a tremor and all sorts of fun things. I just need some distance from having so much of my mind and identity wrapped up in one game; it's not healthy.

Honestly, I feel like you've almost certainly made the best decision on multiple levels.

...

I think this'll give you time you need to not only get the relaxation you sound like you need at this point, but also to ensure that this is the best damn game it can possibly be. There currently aren't too many games in the genre that have held my interest that aren't the progenitor juggernaut that is Civilization itself - but I think you're one of the people I'd trust most to make a game I'd enjoy as much as I did 1, 4, and 5. Don't rush it and make a Civ 3. =333

I already responded to your email about this, just so you know, since Yahoo can be a real snotwad and sometimes doesnt like to actually SEND the blasted things yet will tell me that it did (sigh... why cant technology just WORK? I keep having to tell people directly if I send them something, because of this, which almost blows the point of email to begin with...), but I'll just reiterate that I definitely think this is a very good move. There's just.... so very many problems with releasing now or next month.

I did get your email, and thanks. I responded with some work stuff relating to the interim game, actually.

Just out of pure curiosity, has this game been the longest development cycle you've done so far? Or was AI War's original version longer (because holy heck, that game is COMPLICATED)? I mean, this game really has a TON of stuff to it at this point and has been going for quite awhile. Should be pretty great once it's done though.

Valley 1 was still the longest dev cycle for us at I believe 15(?) months pre-release. So we're not to the longest-yet with SBR, but by the time it's done it will be. That said, we had a smaller staff with Valley 1, so in term of man-months this is by far our longest game. In man-months, TLF would be our #2 behind that, at about 60% of the man-months that went into this game so far.

AI War 1.0 was actually our shortest game ever if you look at man-months. I knocked that puppy out on my own in 7 months. We've had shorter timeframes on projects since then, but never in terms of man-months. So... maybe that does give some insight into why my estimates for timelines on things can get skewed sometimes. If I could do AI War in that timeframe, why not something else, you know?

Definitely looking forward to.... whatever the heck the next game is going to be called though. I think that's the one I'm most excited about since BD, which is saying something. It just sounds like a great concept.

At the moment that's the one I'm most excited about as well, and it's been that way for a while. It's hard to work on something like SBR when it's no longer the thing you're most excited about, too. It will swing back around that it's the thing that I'm most excited about, because I've been super excited about SBR for a long time. But the series of delays and design defeats have just left me feeling pretty battered and not great about myself (I'm not fishing for compliments, but I figure that a frank insight into at least this game developer's mind is interesting to a lot of folks). So it's hard to maintain that sense of excitement when a game has done something like that to you, anyway. Or when you've done something like that to yourself via the game, more appropriately.

In the end I'm really surprised by some of the turns that SBR has taken. It now gets at what my original intents were far better than my original designs did, and I would be delighted by that if I weren't so weary. It does still make me very pleased, though. I'm also really excited that it does seem like it will meet a number of my career goals in terms of telling an interactive procedurally generated story and a variety of other things, so there's also that that pleases me greatly. But I do need some space to where I can sort the good from the bad, and the past pains from the present state of things, etc. The sort of pepping up I need is hopefully what the interim game will provide.

I think this makes a lot of sense and I wish you all the best. I was beginning to feel that even by the end of November, there was no way SBR was going to be able to be a game that fully lived up to its potential on release (which I think is huge, btw - I've been ranting at my friends about this game a bunch).

Well, that's always really cool to hear that folks are getting excited to that point, despite the problems of the moment with a game.

Do you want us to continue posting things on Mantis for SBR or hold off for now?

If there's something you might forget, then please go ahead and feel free to post it. Really I'm not going to say "no don't post!" to anyone right now. But as with my own personal notes, I've got those archived so that I'll remember what I was up to when I come back to the game, and then I'm just putting those out of sight for a while to let them marinate and free up my mind a bit.

2. The point about "if the game is great, it doesn't matter when you release" is somewhat taken, but I think that people do tend to overlook all the great "cult classics" that never caught on for one reason or another. In other words, this smacks a bit to me of being over-confident. Which I have certainly been many times, but am not really feeling in the spirit of right now.

System Shock says hi. That's a cult classic legend of a game that just never took off and never made the money back due to a botched release.

There was indeed a feeling of panic going around. And I understand the concept of becoming too intimate with the project. I am in a similar situation, too many months - too much code.

Yeah, even when I was doing business software and didn't have the same kind of emotional stake in my work, there was still the occasional case of this. I mean, I was proud of my work and invested myself in it, so some really giant thing that was being developed for clients could be quite the entanglement. I never had an individual project that went on this long, though, so that's new to me with Arcen. What line of work are you in?

SBR needs more work in its systems, interactions, gui, story, tooltips,combat, AI, pacing, etc, etc. A lot of work.

Vision fading... yeah, this is why I'm stepping away for a bit. You've been one of the biggest supporters lately, and to hear you say that is a bit of a blow. Not that I wouldn't want you to say it, and I agree with you on all the points. But it's a good example of how I've just gotten too involved in it mentally. It shouldn't be that much of a punch to hear "you have more work to do on XYZ areas." Hopefully the interim project will provide some reasonable success that I can use as some insulation against the inevitable ups and downs of a project as complex and novel as SBR.

As others have said and I agree, a project should stay in EA at least for a year as a business model and build momentum. Barring that it would feel like a cash grab game with extreme risk for the buyer and it would face harsh criticism from youtubers and the community in general. Add to that the fact that you're not a new studio so people have expectations. You can't be productive in such an environment and you need a community manager that is a true Warlord.

Whoa, a year in EA? I don't know about that -- that would bring the total this game would need to earn up to close to $1.5 million gross. It wouldn't be our first game to hit that level, but I mean that would be the break-even point just to earn back what was spent making it. I'd like to think that we're not that far off the finish line, but then again I'm just not in a good place to judge right now. At any rate this definitely isn't a conversation I'm emotionally equipped to handle right now, and the point is moot for another 3-4 months either way. Whew, though.

So basically, you'll be working on the new SHMUP to get that rolled out ASAP. When do you expect the Alpha to start? I saw an earlier post where it was posited that this will be like the alpha/beta releases of TLF, where the game is available directly from Arcen (or via Humble Store) from its earliest playable state, and then you push updates out from Arcen directly. Any thoughts on what your asking price for the game will be?

I have a lot to figure out in the next week or so on those points, so take my answers with a grain of salt, heh:

1. To some extent I'm wary of calling this a SHMUP. Let's say roguelike, perhaps.

2. Starting the alpha... I'm not sure. I hope to have a nice internal prototype by the end of next week. Depending on how things look with that my goal is for an alpha to start in November sometime with a solid degree of starting content to the point where you can get a good idea of it. In an ideal world, closer to the start of November.

3. Most likely we'll do a very small private alpha first to do some sanity checking with some folks. Then go to the paid alpha (at a discount off full price) after that.

4. I'm not 100% sure on the final cost of the game. I'd estimate between $10 and $15. Given the nature of the genre, and the staff we have, my intent is to pack this thing to the gills with content. We have the capability of doing certain kinds of content independent of weighing me down as a designer or Keith down as a coder, and I intend to make full use of that.

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4. I'm not 100% sure on the final cost of the game. I'd estimate between $10 and $15. Given the nature of the genre, and the staff we have, my intent is to pack this thing to the gills with content. We have the capability of doing certain kinds of content independent of weighing me down as a designer or Keith down as a coder, and I intend to make full use of that.

Ah, this reminds me of the one question I forgot to ask in my response email. If you're going with the idea of premade rooms/floors/areas/something or whatever, is this something you might be able to get outside help with? Not just myself, I mean, but even just some random people in the community being able to submit possible room designs. I know *I* at least would find it entertaining to do, that sort of thing is usually my favorite part of game design actually. To be able to do it for this sort of game, it working the way you described it so far, would be even more entertaining. I bet plenty of others would find it entertaining too. And the more rooms the game has to select from, the better.

Just curious about that.

Anyway, it sounds like you were getting waaaaayyyyyyyyyy too stressed out over this here... I know it's not really my business, but I always think you guys put in far too many hours. I really dont know how you manage it. Or maybe that's just me being lazy, I'm about ready to throw something at the wall after about 2 hours. But still, blackouts and such.... ugh. Definitely sounds good that you'll be able to get some distance from the whole thing. Frankly, it just sounded very frustrating, making all of those constant changes, and as Gnosis said, it still seemed far from done. Which hopefully doesnt sound mean here, and I think I've said as much before anyway. I hope you recover quick from that though, feeling like that aint any fun at all.

And I hadnt realized that Valley 1's development time was that long! Agh, I swear that game's beta feels like a bazillion years ago or so.

Sounds like a wise decision to me all around.I am too looking forward to the new game -especially more details being leaked by you Chris .

Regarding SBR: Would you consider to at least release the currently completed fixes?That way Act 2 would be actually winnable and allow players to have some fun with the current state in a way that allows them to actually complete a given game.

Ah, this reminds me of the one question I forgot to ask in my response email. If you're going with the idea of premade rooms/floors/areas/something or whatever, is this something you might be able to get outside help with? Not just myself, I mean, but even just some random people in the community being able to submit possible room designs. I know *I* at least would find it entertaining to do, that sort of thing is usually my favorite part of game design actually. To be able to do it for this sort of game, it working the way you described it so far, would be even more entertaining. I bet plenty of others would find it entertaining too. And the more rooms the game has to select from, the better.

I'm definitely hoping so! It was popular with Valley 1 and 2, so maybe we'll see that again.

Anyway, it sounds like you were getting waaaaayyyyyyyyyy too stressed out over this here... I know it's not really my business, but I always think you guys put in far too many hours. I really dont know how you manage it. Or maybe that's just me being lazy, I'm about ready to throw something at the wall after about 2 hours. But still, blackouts and such.... ugh. Definitely sounds good that you'll be able to get some distance from the whole thing. Frankly, it just sounded very frustrating, making all of those constant changes, and as Gnosis said, it still seemed far from done. Which hopefully doesnt sound mean here, and I think I've said as much before anyway. I hope you recover quick from that though, feeling like that aint any fun at all.

Yeah, definitely too many hours. Mostly I try to keep everyone else insulated from that or at least compensate them for it, but the sense of burnout has been strong with a number of us.

4 when you say private do you mean in the same way that stars is or even more private?.

I mean something super brief, a week or less, and probably just involving a handful of people that we'll reach out to (or who PM us proactively, as is often the case). And then opening it up more widely. We did this prior to the main beta of SBR starting, too, actually.

5 are act 3/4 going to be implemented at all before you lock stars away temporarily? mainly so people can do some better clarity on the balance certain things.

Nope! All work on SBR stopped yesterday and is on hold for now. We just need to move on for a bit, and dragging out the transition doesn't help anything. We'll be back on it in February, but in the meantime we just stopped all in one big jolt.

Regarding SBR: Would you consider to at least release the currently completed fixes?That way Act 2 would be actually winnable and allow players to have some fun with the current state in a way that allows them to actually complete a given game.

Unfortunately there are some half-completed things in the codebase right now that would bust it if we released them. And if we finished those, it would take another half day or so, which I'd rather just wait on. Sorry about that!

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